Ask most Americans today to describe Rosie the Riveter and they’ll think of the young woman from the “We Can Do It!” poster, her right arm flexed, her blue work shirt’s sleeves rolled up, her black hair pulled back under a red, polka-dot headscarf, her gaze resolute. She’s a pop-culture icon, an immensely popular feminist image, our symbol of the women who joined the nation’s workforce during World War II.
But the “We Can Do It!” poster was unknown to the American public in the 1940s. Produced for Westinghouse Electric Corp. by graphic artist J. Howard Miller, it was displayed only in the company’s helmet-liner factories, and only for two weeks, in 1943. The “We Can Do It!” worker didn’t have a name, and she wasn’t widely seen until her discovery in a 1982 Washington Post Magazine article about patriotic posters in the National Archives.
Still, Americans 75 years ago did know Rosie the Riveter — as a character in a pop song and a magazine cover painted by Norman Rockwell. Thanks to them, by Labor Day 1943 “Rosie” was America’s most popular nickname for female factory workers, especially the many women who worked in shipyards and bomber plants to contribute to the war effort.
Rosie the Riveter, the character, was invented in 1942 by songwriters John Jacob Loeb and Redd Evans. Loeb was a prolific songwriter who went on to write for bandleader Guy Lombardo. Evans’s music career included stints as a singer and as a clarinetist and saxophonist in dance orchestras. They wrote the song “Rosie the Riveter” in New York City’s Brill Building, the most famous location in American songwriting, home to music studios and song publishers’ offices.
“I was there — in fact, it was probably written on my office piano,” music historian Robert Lissauer, a business partner of Loeb’s, recounted in a 1994 interview with author Penny Colman. “They wanted to write a song about women who were working for the war effort for the country. So they just made up the name ‘Rosie the Riveter.’ You pick a name for the alliteration and you go ahead and write it.”
The song celebrates a woman who works all day, driving rivets on a bomber factory’s assembly line:
She’s making history,
Working for victory,
Rosie the Riveter.
Keeps a sharp lookout for sabotage
Sitting up there on the fuselage.
By “working overtime on the riveting machine,” the song says, Rosie protects her boyfriend, a Marine named Charlie who’s fighting in the war. She even wins an “E” — the Army-Navy Excellence in Production award.